In today's modern manufacturing environment there has been a shift towards the philosophy of lean manufacturing. In an effort to comply with this philosophy, manufacturing managers are constantly making efforts to reduce waste and to promote better productivity among their workers. One tool that has been utilized in an effort to improve productivity is for the manufacturing facility to prominently display scoreboards within the facility in an effort to encourage teamwork and a spirit of competitive improvement among the workers.
For example, in an effort to increase productivity, a scoreboard may visually display indications of a goal for a planned number of production units based on the amount of time used in the production process, a display of actual units produced and a value showing the difference between the goal number of units of production and the actual units produced, thus demonstrating whether the production team or individual employee is ahead of or behind the goal value per unit time.
In another example, if a manufacturer is making an effort to improve quality control, they might display a scoreboard indicating a number of production units that have passed inspection, a number of production units that have failed inspection, and a calculated ratio showing a percentage or fraction of production units that have failed inspection.
If a manufacturer is interested in improving compliance with safety procedures within the facility, the manufacturer might display a scoreboard that indicates the number of days since the last injury has occurred in the facility, the number of injuries that occurred during the current month, and the number of injuries that occurred during the prior month.
Existing manufacturing scoreboards that aim to improve productivity largely tend to share one common shortcoming. Management personnel must set a goal for production and program the scoreboard with that goal. This can be a lengthy and difficult task. For example, a particular time must be calculated that should be the expected or goal time to produce a single unit of production. While this calculation may not be an overly large burden in a manufacturing facility that produces very large numbers of the same production unit day after day over a long period of time, it can create a significant burden in job shops that produce short runs of production units over a short period of time. Quite often, the length of time required to calculate a production goal may be greater than the length of time required to produce the entire lot in a given job. Currently available productivity scoreboards do not factor in operator skill, speed or other current variables.
Many manufacturing jobs are repetitive and dull and tend to encourage wandering of the worker's mind while working. After working for a period of time, an employee may become bored and decide to distract himself by engaging in conversation with fellow workers, going to the bathroom, getting a snack, creating other nonproductive tasks to remove himself from the production task at hand or merely day dreaming on the job. All of these activities are non-productive and contribute substantially to periods of downtime. Downtime can be described as periods of time when production is not taking place because the production employee is distracted, interrupted, adjusting or making repairs or adjustments to equipment.
Downtime also occurs if there is some failure in quality of the previous steps in the production process. For example, if a production part is improperly prepared in the first step of the production process, this may slow down subsequent steps in the production process because of the need to adjust or manipulate the part an excessive amount to complete the second or subsequent steps. It is not uncommon for downtime to reach an hour or more in an 8-hour shift. It can readily be seen that if more than one-eighth of a working shift is spent in downtime, production is significantly reduced.
Thus, it would be a great benefit if a production scoreboard could be largely self-programming and could display a reference value for the amount of downtime that occurs in a given production period. It would be further beneficial if the self programming feature would take into account variables that may be specific to that workday such as personnel, process and work environment. It would also be valuable to demonstrate to the worker the significant overall effect on productivity of the many distractions and brief work stoppages that may seem trivial to the worker. These features would allow a manager to intervene early on upon observing that there is a significantly greater amount of downtime than the norm, in order to try to make changes that would improve the productivity for the remainder of the shift.